Haiti ’s Youth Ambassador appeals to COHSOD
(CARICOM Secretariat,Georgetown) Haiti’s CARICOM Youth Ambassador, Leticia Cadet yesterday made an impassioned plea to the Caribbean Community to help re-build, as a matter of priority, the education system in Haiti .

At a special meeting of the Council for Human and Social Development (COHSOD) in Paramaribo , Suriname, Ms Cadet recalled with obvious grief the devastation caused by the earthquake, which crippled Port-au-Prince on 12 January, leaving in its wake a climbing death toll of more than 200, 000.

Ms Cadet said Haiti needed the support of its partners, including members of the CARICOM Community, to continue providing education to its current students “to avoid creating a potentially detrimental gap in qualified human resources.”

She added that Haiti had little capacity and few facilities to offer tertiary education, and that the catastrophic earthquake had further weakened the tertiary education system.

Haiti has one State University with nearly 23,000 students. Each year 18,000 youth seek attendance at an undergraduate school, but only 3,000 are admitted. During the earthquake, the School of Nursing and the School of Human Sciences collapsed, while the other buildings were damaged. It is likely that those students who escaped will not only lose the rest of the academic year, but their education and training might be disrupted for a longer period. This will have a serious impact on the human capital so necessary for the rebuilding of that nation.

In this regard, Miss Cadet called upon the COHSOD to impress upon Heads of Government the need to provide at least 20 scholarships per year for the next five years (starting in Fall 2010) for Haitian students to attend the University of the West Indies (UWI). In addition, she expressed hope that the UWI would be more ‘flexible’ in enrolling Haitian students during this special disaster relief effort.

Ms Cadet further urged CARICOM to develop a mechanism that would help youth in Haiti to access funding for entrepreneurship. Those young people, she said, would also get support and mentoring from the State University and the private sector of Haiti .

The COHSOD endorsed her appeal and agreed to present her petition to the Heads of Government at the Special Summit closing today in Paramaribo.